Empowering Citizens with Open Data by Urban Hackathons

Abstract

Empowering citizens to make meaningful use of open data is a challenge somehow less central than others to public sector information disclosure policies. The latter are typically focused on promoting business innovations and economic activities in general (first goal) or increasing transparency in government and/or political inclusion (second goal). Based on the interim results of an ongoing EU funded project, which has run five independent Hackathons in as many European cities during the year 2016, we note that the time is ripe for establishing alternative ways of citizen integration in public service (re)design processes that may act as a sort of accelerators for some key, social and political, dynamics of change.